Mystifying Mosaics

The marvelous diversity of life—from pronghorns to pandas—reveals something,
but what? Each organism has a unique combination of traits perfectly suited for its needs. It appears that the complex, all-wise,
triune Creator left His mark in every thread in the tapestry of creation.

When George Shaw, the British Museum curator, saw the animal pelt lying before
him, he had trouble believing it was not a hoax. It looked like a variety of
parts taken from different animals and sewn together.

Before the end of the eighteenth century, no European biologist had ever seen
a mammal with a duck-like bill. Interest in the platypus (a unique animal from
Australia) grew when people realized that, of the thousands of mammal species
in the world, only it (and the echidna) laid eggs! The platypus has a fascinating
and unique combination of characters.

Similarly, the pronghorn might be seen as just another fleet-footed, magnificently
beautiful deer, if not for its “prongs.” Like deer antlers, the prongs are branched
(in males), and they shed and regrow every year. But like horns on cattle, the
prongs are made out of a different substance, similar to our fingernails (keratin),
which grows on a bony core.

So the pronghorn has antler characteristics like the scores of species in the
deer family but horn characteristics like the scores of species in the cattle-antelope
family. How then should it be classified? Its combination of traits makes the
pronghorn altogether unique.

The red panda is another example. Because it is cute, nonaggressive, and easy
to care for, the red panda is popular in our zoos. But the unassuming creature
is a bit baffling to scientists who classify animals. Its ringed tail and “masked”
eyes make some people think it must be a type of raccoon. And, sure enough,
some experts want to classify it that way. But other characteristics suggest
that it should be grouped with the bears.

The name “red panda” reflects its close association with another animal, which
possesses both raccoon and bear traits—the giant panda. Unlike raccoons and
typical bears, both the giant and red pandas have unique “thumbs” on their wrists!
(These “thumbs” are not constructed from finger bones like our thumbs, but they
are actually extensions of wrist bones, called radial sesamoid bones.)

The Mystery of Mosaics

The platypus, the pronghorn, and the red panda are just three examples of animals
that possess a mosaic of traits we wouldn’t expect to find together in one animal.
Mosaic animals defy classification into just one group with which they share
some traits, so scientists often classify mosaics into groups of their own.

Mosaic organisms are found throughout God’s creation. They have all sorts of
strange names, but if you’re familiar with the organisms, the strange combinations
are just as striking as the platypus, pronghorn, or red panda:

Among plants, gnetophytes share traits with gymnosperms and angiosperms.

Dinoflagellates share traits with both plants and animals.

Blindskinks share traits with snakes and worm lizards.

Therizinosaur dinosaurs have hips like birds, but they share
other traits with the lizard-hipped sauropods and theropods.

The hoatzin bird shares traits with several different bird orders.

My personal favorites are the arthropod fossils of the Burgess Shale of the
Rocky Mountains. Arthropod bodies generally have two or more main body segments
with an assortment of appendages attached to the segments.

As Stephen Jay Gould described them in Wonderful Life, it was as if their parts
were strung together by what Gould called the “Great Token-Stringer.” Reaching
into a barrel of different arthropod heads, another barrel of thoraxes, and
other barrels with abdomens and legs, the Token-Stringer seemingly “strung”
the parts together in random sequence. Upon completion, in the words of Gould,
“Voilà, it works.” The Burgess arthropods are bizarre mosaics.

Mosaics Explained?

So, in nature we find many strange creatures—arthropods strung together like
a necklace, a panda’s “thumb” jimmied from a wrist bone, and a platypus sewn
together from body parts like a hoax. These images don’t evoke design. At least,
that was Gould’s argument in a book about the clumsy appearance of the panda’s
thumb.

However, a closer look at mosaics suggests otherwise. The panda’s thumb, for
example, turns out to allow greater clamping precision than is possible with
our thumbs. Similarly, the platypus bill is remarkably designed to detect electric
fields of the animals it eats. Likewise the pronghorn, which is in the running
for the title of “fastest land animal on the planet,” is hardly an example of
poor design.

We might think a mosaic combination of features could only result in clumsy
design, but mosaic organisms show otherwise. Mosaics are evidence of creation
by the wise God of Scripture, who has a purpose for everything.

On God’s magnificent easel of creation, He spoke into being one grand, magnificent mosaic that incorporated a diverse array of distinct organisms.

I suggest that mosaics are actually a common feature of God’s world, by design.
On God’s magnificent easel of creation, He spoke into being one grand, magnificent
mosaic that incorporated a diverse array of distinct organisms.

If you could plot all the distinct created “kinds” of organisms on a graph,
based on their features, you would see that God filled the graph with a tapestry
of distinct kinds. Between these different kinds God scattered mosaics.1 For
instance, between deer and antelope kinds He put pronghorns; between raccoon
and bear kinds He put pandas; and so it goes.

Mosaics in the Fossil Record

Yet those who reject the Creator can twist the message of these mosaics. If
they want to see similarities among organisms as evidence of genetic relationships,
rather than God’s design, then they call the mosaics genetic “intermediates.”
When mosaics are found between two groups that they believe to be related by
evolution, they herald these mosaics as evolutionary “links.”

There is an altogether different, and biblical, way to interpret mosaics in
the fossil record. If God created a tapestry of different ecosystems before
Noah’s Flood, we would find different creatures living in ecosystems right next
to each other. It’s reasonable to expect that God occasionally created intermediate
environments between ecosystems and placed mosaics into that environment. If
this is true, and if the rising Flood waters took out one ecosystem at a time,
then the Flood might have occasionally buried mosaics in a layer between two
other, similar organisms.2

All examples of evolutionary links that have ever been claimed, such as australopithecines
(between tree-dwelling apes and earth-dwelling humans), archaeocetes
(between quadrupeds and modern whales), mammal-like reptiles (between reptiles
and mammals), Archaeopteryx (between reptiles and birds), and Tiktaalik
and Acanthostega (between fish and amphibians) are, in fact, mosaics,
not links.

Despite claims to the contrary, these mosaics have always been challenging
for evolution. Think about it. The traits that make them a mosaic are fully
developed characteristics of the other groups. They are not the partially developed,
intermediate traits that evolution intuitively would expect. It is impossible
for an evolutionary biologist to explain how the fully developed traits of “curious
mosaics” (as Stephen Jay Gould once called Archaeopteryx) could have
come to be.

Furthermore, evolutionists are only interested in the mosaics that appear to
link two other groups thought to be related by evolution. So they ignore most
mosaics—both in the fossil record and in the present—because they are not between
groups evolutionists ever thought to be related.

For example, no one ever thought the duck-billed platypus was an evolutionary
link between ducks and mammals. Similarly, no one ever claimed pronghorns and
red pandas as evolutionary links. In fact, the vast percentage of mosaics has
never been labeled as evolutionary links because they link the wrong organisms.

So, on the one hand, evolution has far too few links. On the other hand, the
world is full of links the evolutionist cannot use at all. It appears as though
God intentionally created the world this way, to reinforce His unique role as
the Author and Creator of the mosaic of life on this planet.

Only when isolated mosaics are picked selectively out of context, while ignoring
the difficulties of acquiring fully developed characteristics from scratch,
can any mosaic be claimed as evidence of evolution. In contrast, when considered
as a whole, mosaics are better understood as wonders in God’s tapestry of creation—evidence
of a beautifully complex triune God, a God who is both three and one, both diverse
and singular, both orderly and surprising.

Answers Magazine

July – September 2008

In this issue discover the wonders of God’s creation and see how our Creator is clearly seen all around us. Articles cover bizarre creatures in the fossil record, the intricate “matrix” of bacteria, the eye, and many other marvels.

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Footnotes

No one has ever systematically counted the mosaics in the world—living
or fossil. I personally suspect that there is something on the order of one
mosaic design for every character trait that distinguishes groups of organisms.
This may result in at least one mosaic organism for every clearly defined group
of organisms. We also don’t know at this point how many of the mosaics are separate
created “kinds” and how many of them are part of the diversity that God placed
within other created kinds. My suspicion is that most mosaics were programmed
into the other clearly defined created kinds (so their existence would not significantly
affect how many animals Adam named or how many animals Noah took onto the Ark).

For example, the author has suggested that the Devonian fossils, which contain
traits of both fish and amphibians (e.g., Tiktaalik and Acanthostega) lived
before the Flood on the edge of a “floating forest” in an unusual environment
that mixed characteristics from both ocean and forest environments (look for
an article on “floating forests” in the next issue). For a short time after
the Flood, land animals from the different pre-Flood environments were together
in one place—on the Ark. As they spread out, mosaic animals would not necessarily
settle near the other, similar animals that once lived near them. Nor would
they find “intermediate environments” like the ones where they had lived before
the Flood. This “haphazard” resettlement pattern would explain why many mosaic
animals of the present—such as platypuses, pandas, and pronghorns—live in very
different places from the animals that are most similar to them.

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Answers in Genesis is an apologetics ministry, dedicated to helping Christians defend their faith and proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ effectively. We focus on providing answers to questions about the Bible—particularly the book of Genesis—regarding key issues such as creation, evolution, science, and the age of the earth.